Cognitive labor and recipes.

Last night I used the second half of a package of Spanish-style chorizo to make huevos rotos.  This tastes pretty close to how we had it in Spain. Recipe follows, and blog post below that.

Simple Huevos Rotos (broken eggs)

• 1.5 lb tiny potatoes... you know those bags of prewashed potatoes they have now?  One of those bags.
• 2 links (so, 4-6 oz) of Spanish-style, fully-cooked chorizo sausage
• 1 small onion, optional
• About 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 4 eggs
• Salt to taste

Cut the potatoes into halves or quarters, 1" pieces, and boil in salted water until just tender; drain and spread on a towel-lined tray to dry fully.

Meanwhile, cut the optional onion into small dice and slice the chorizo thinly.

When the potatoes are dry, heat 1/4" of olive oil in a broad skillet that can hold them all.  Fry the potatoes, stirring gently, till browned and as crispy as you like them.  Remove all the potatoes with slotted spoon and divide among four plates (if that's too many potatoes, put any extra to drain on paper towels); salt them.

Add to the hot oil the onion (if you like) and stir, then the chorizo, just for a couple of minutes; remove with slotted spoon (if you dislike burned onion, be sure to get it all out) and scatter over potatoes.  

Fry eggs two at a time in the hot chorizo-flavored oil, sunny side up.  Poke the whites with your spatula to spread them out and give them a lacy edge; baste the whites with a spoon.  When the edges are crispy and the whites set, but the yolks still runny, drape the eggs over the potatoes and chorizo.  Break the yolks so they run all over, and serve.

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I've wanted to attempt huevos rotos ever since we had it on our brief vacation together in Spain last fall.  I've kept it there in the back of my mind as I made the grocery lists and meal plans, and checked the meat sections of the various supermarkets I have shopped in; they often had chorizo, but always the Mexican style, which I'm not as fond of, or an American "chorizo" that isn't quite the same.  When I was out on a long walk in Northeast Minneapolis last weekend, I stopped into Kramarczuk's (no dice) and then into Surdyk's cheese shop, where--hurrah!-- I found a twelve-ounce package of Spanish-style chorizo.  I stuck it in the fridge and the next time the meal plan came around I figured out which day I wouldn't be gone all day, nor too tired to cook in the evening---a Saturday---and put it on the list.  I stuck a Spanish rosé in the fridge that morning.  It was a brilliant dinner.  And since it only used half the package of chorizo, I did it again last night.

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A few days ago a new paper came out in American Sociological Review:  Daminger A, "The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor."   I appreciate Daminger's emphasis of the term "cognitive labor" here, because there's been a lot of messy terminology being thrown around about the work of generally keeping on top of the household.  I've particularly been annoyed by a trend towards calling it "emotional labor," which is a problem because

• (a) "emotional labor" already has a useful meaning, i.e., the part of any job where you have to work to manage other people's emotions or work to control your own, and
• (b) "emotional labor" as a referent to the management of physical tasks is precariously and non-ironically close to meaning "women's work."

The same tasks have also been called "invisible labor" by others, but Daminger's term is more precise, and I think she's done us a favor in describing it in some detail.  From the abstract:

The data [in-depth interviews with 35 couples] demonstrate that cognitive labor entails anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress. Because such work is taxing but often invisible to both cognitive laborers and their partners, it is a frequent source of conflict for couples. Cognitive labor is also a gendered phenomenon: women in this study do more cognitive labor overall and more of the anticipation and monitoring work in particular. However, male and female participation in decision-making, arguably the cognitive labor component most closely linked to power and influence, is roughly equal. These findings identify and define an overlooked—yet potentially consequential— source of gender inequality at the household level and suggest a new direction for research on the division of household labor.

I am genuinely interested in cognitive labor as a gender issue, not because it is a source of conflict in my own marriage, but explicitly because it isn't. 

I completely understand how it can be.  I have observed such conflicts in others.  In my experience, this kind of conflict is responsible for a very high number of the "ha ha, aren't husbands always like this" sort of small talk that you occasionally get when a lot of mothers are together in a room.   

So... why do I not perceive it as a source of conflict in our home?  Here are some possibilities.  

1. My spouse and I share the cognitive labor relatively equally:  I specialize in some parts, and he in others, and we don't have an expectation that we'll keep track of the stuff that's in the other's sphere.  (This is my knee-jerk explanation.)
2. We don't share it equally, but we are content with the division:  whoever's shouldering more is glad enough to be in charge of that stuff instead of something else. 
3. We don't share it equally, but whoever's shouldering more has lower standards and/or has accepted their lot in this marriage.
4. Actually, it's Mark who is carrying a burdensome cognitive load and I'm the one who is as clueless as the spouses (both male) who are quoted in the opening lines of the paper.  If you knew me in person, you would know that this is not an outlandish possibility.

I'm looking forward to reading the paper in depth because Daminger applies to her thirty-five couples the kind of analysis that speaks to me.  She divides up the cognitive labor in the household into separate "domains," and classifies each as "male-led," "female-led," "shared," or "undetermined."  Along the way she identifies four components of cognitive labor (anticipation of a need, problem, or opportunity; identifyion options; choosing an option; and monitoring the results).  I noticed and appreciated that she left out the performing of the task---a lot of discussion of this kind of thing seems to me to have conflated the task-doing with the mental tasks, so she's made a newly nice distinction.  And then she examines the couples' dynamics for sources of conflict, the reasons why it doesn't make always make it into the couple's "economy of gratitude," and the balance of overall load and decision-making power.

(Yes, I'm setting myself up to write a follow-up post.  Fingers crossed.)

In the meantime I find myself musing about the cognitive load I perceive myself to carry. As a matter of personality and skill-set, I enjoy most kinds of cognitive labor more than most kinds of physical labor.  I will very often perform cognitive tasks, even fairly rote and low-level ones, as a means of procrastination of physical labor.  I loved being at school.  I didn't like the stress of graduate school very much, and I turned out to be a poor experimentalist, and it was hard to juggle everything after I had babies, but the actual academic work---the reading and writing, the computer code, the hours in the library, the organizing of information, the pencil-and-paper calculations---flowed right by.  I would look up and hours would have gone by, and I didn't even notice it.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have chosen to take on most of the work homeschooling our offspring, in part, because it has allowed me to "cognitivize" a life of mothering at home.  As I write, the other windows open on my computer desktop involve detailed schedules of the school subjects that my homeschooled children will be starting this fall:  pages and pages of spreadsheets and booklists.  I've taught myself one whole new language and parts of four others, learned a considerable amount of  biology and art that I never got in school, crammed a lot of educational psychology to try to help one child struggling with the ability to focus, and worked out on my own how to put together a transcript customized for two different universities.

All this is a lot of work, but work I enjoy (much more than the work of sitting down with anyone who is at all recalcitrant or fighting off sleep and trying to teach them).  I am primarily concerned with my own sense of satisfaction in a life well lived.  I admit one navel-gazing indulgence:    I occasionally consider whether the wider world has, in net, lost or gained from my decisions.  I'm not a special person, but my cognitive power has been trained at considerable expense to the taxpaying public, who might have expected to get some kind of results out of me.  And what do they have?  Not much work put into the economies of money and academy;  almost everything into an economy of relationships.  Almost all my efforts  into just a few people, instead of spreading it out and having a smaller effect on many.  Who knows who paid the opportunity cost?

I do not know.  But I know this:  I eat very well.   

And that is as good a stopping point for this post as any.

Comments

[Melanie B]

I also am largely satisfied with the division of labor in our house. Especially of cognitive labor. And what you say about cognitivizing the work of mothering at home resonates with me as well. We obviously have very different personalities and competencies and thus our approaches as to how we go about that work are very different, but I also derive great satisfaction from the intellectual aspects of raising and teaching children.

I like the way you enumerated the possible reasons for your lack of dissatisfaction.

[bearing]

I missed one possibility, which is that I haven’t totted it up correctly.

[Jenny]

I like the phrase 'cognitive labor' to describe this work.

For me, it is hard to distinguish between uneven divisions of labor and just plain ole overwhelm. There's so much to do and so little space in which to do it.